INSECTS
chester, under the presidency of Mr. Hoyle of the Owens College Museum.
Besides these bodies, which are exclusively devoted to the study of insects, nearly every town in Lancashire has its field club or some form of natural history society. At many of such societies papers on entomology are read and discussed, but few of them publish more than an abstract of their proceedings. Larger and more comprehensive societies, such as the Liverpool 'Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire,' 'Biological Society,' and 'Literary and Philosophical Society,' have from time to time published papers dealing more especially with the entomology of the district.
In earlier days the 'Manchester Banksian Society,' which flourished between 1829 and 1836, formed a centre for the naturalists of that time in south-west Lancashire, and most of the early Lancashire entomologists appear to have been members of it.
At least two other more exclusively entomological societies seem to have existed in Manchester at a somewhat later date: 'The Northern Entomological Society,' which meets at the house of one of the members at Old TrafFord, Manchester, and was in existence at any rate in 1862; and the 'Manchester Entomological Society,' which seems to have flourished from 1857 to some time in the 'sixties.' These societies appear however to have published no transactions or proceedings, and their meetings were probably of rather an informal character. Indeed it is difficult now to secure any authentic or consecutive information as to their character or results.
In the lists which follow, the local distribution of the orders Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera (Aculeata), Hemiptera, and Orthoptera is given with as much detail as the space at our disposal will admit. These lists are far from exhaustive, and additions to all of them are yearly being made by students of the several orders. Few of the older entomologists appear to have realized the importance of the accurate recording of the localities of their captures, and the greater part of these lists is due to the exertions of more modern workers.
In regard to the other orders, Neuroptera, Trichoptera, Diptera, etc., there exists no material for the compilation of lists that would be of value for publication here. Of the Neuroptera and Trichoptera no authentic records are known to the writer. The Diptera have been to some extent studied by the late Benjamin Cooke of Liverpool and the late Rev. H. H. Higgins of Rainhill. The former published a list of Diptera taken near Manchester and Southport in the pages of the Naturalist, No. lvii.-lx. vol. 5 (1880), and the latter a short list of the Syrphidæ of the Liverpool district in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1858). Neither of these lists however is very complete and in some cases perhaps not absolutely trustworthy, and as neither professes to represent the order as it is generally distributed throughout the county they are not reproduced here.
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